Grid watch: mapping blackouts with smart phones

Abstract

The power grid is one of humanity's most significant engineering undertakings and it is essential in developed and developing nations alike. Currently, transparency into the power grid relies on utility companies and more fine-grained insight is provided by costly smart meter deployments. We claim that greater visibility into power grid conditions can be provided in an inexpensive and crowd-sourced manner independent of utility companies by leveraging existing smartphones. Our key insight is that an unmodified smartphone can detect power outages by monitoring changes to its own power state, locally verifying these outages using a variety of sensors that reduce the likelihood of false power outage reports, and corroborating actual reports with other phones through data aggregation in the cloud. The proposed approach enables a decentralized system that can scale, potentially providing researchers and concerned citizens with a powerful new tool to analyze the power grid and hold utility companies accountable for poor power quality. This paper demonstrates the viability of the basic idea, identifies a number of challenges that are specific to this application as well as ones that are common to many crowd-sourced applications, and highlights some improvements to smartphone operating systems that could better support such applications in the future.